Gist.com Shutting Down on Sept 15 to Focus on “Creating the Native Address Book/Contact Manager” for BlackBerry 10

Back in Febuary 2011 RIM acquired Gist, when they acquired Gist RIM left them alone for the most part unchanged, until now. In a blog post on Gist.com they have announced that on September 15, 2012, they will be shutting down the website. This is not all bad news as they will be focusing on “creating the native address book/contact manager for the next generation platform, BlackBerry® 10. In addition to our core focus on the Contacts app, we have been given expanded responsibility for everything social at RIM including BlackBerry® Messenger (BBM™), Facebook® and Twitter® apps and instant messaging as well as much of the identity platform (BlackBerry® ID), location services and user analytic features.”

We started Gist in 2008 to make connecting with your key contacts faster and easier to help you create stronger business relationships. In February of 2011, we agreed to become part of Research In Motion® (RIM®) and bring the Gist vision to millions of BlackBerry® customers and help create the world’s largest connected social graph. A few months ago, we shared exciting news about the new BlackBerry® PlayBook™ OS 2.0 Contacts app that we’ve been working on since joining RIM. More recently, our team has been tasked with creating the native address book/contact manager for the next generation platform, BlackBerry® 10. In addition to our core focus on the Contacts app, we have been given expanded responsibility for everything social at RIM including BlackBerry® Messenger (BBM™), Facebook® and Twitter® apps and instant messaging as well as much of the identity platform (BlackBerry® ID), location services and user analytics features. With all this responsibility, we feel even more empowered to deliver a truly unique and amazing experience for aggregating, enhancing and connecting you deeply with your key contacts. All of this feels pretty exciting, but you may have noticed limited innovation on the core Gist product offering over the last year. In an effort to make the most of our new focus, we have, with heavy hearts, decided to shutdown the stand-alone Gist service. Sigh.

As of today, we are no longer accepting new users and Gist.com will officially be closing on September 15, 2012.

We know you put a lot into Gist and we want to help make sure you can get that value out, so we are helping to make it easy to get a solid copy of your contacts and transition to other services. Please take a look at the process below.

Please log into Gist.com and make sure we have your correct email address. You can review and update this information by going to Account > Account Settings.

Next, from the Accounts Setting page click “Export Data” to view your export options. From here, you will have the option to export your data in vCard and/or CSV format, set an importance cutoff and choose to export just people, companies or both.

We’ve set up a support page to help you import your information into other services (Google Mail™, Outlook®, Mac® Mail, Yahoo!®) as well as lots of other awesome services in our space that you might like to try.

If you have questions about this process please email us at support_gist@rim.com so that we can work directly with you to help make sure your information is exported correctly.

The past few years have been exciting, and we thank all of our fans and users for sticking with us and helping us build an amazing company. We appreciate your support and invite you to continue to follow the best of what’s to come via @BlackBerry and the Inside BlackBerry Blog. We hope you’ll join us on our journey at RIM with the new BlackBerry 10 platform.

Remember, connected people change history… so check out these awesome services to help you manage your contacts and build relationships in the future!